January 27, 2008

so I'm trying to read books on my iPod touch in bed, and rather than use the PDF I made of Dr Moreau (which I found a bit annoying due to the "paper" margins) I tried reading it direct from Gutenberg in Safari. Unfortunately, there is no obvious way to change the font size or to reflow the text based on a zoom level. Basically it's like they never considered that people might want to read text on sites which aren't a column layout. Stupid.

Another gripe: it doesn't do a very good job of saving your position when switching tabs, especially when the screen orientation changes. When I worked on Kindle I spent a hell of a lot of time making damned sure that zooming and pagination and location stability made sense. Clearly Apple didn't really consider a "reading lots" use case for mobile Safari.